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Submission + - The Anti-Pirate System That Will Probably Work. (blogspot.com) 4

Submitted by spidweb
spidweb writes: Much virtual ink has been spilled over Ubisoft's new, harsh DRM system for Assassin's Creed 2. You must have a constant internet connection, and, if your connection breaks, the game exits. While this has angered many (and justifiably so), most writers on the topic have made an error. They think that this system, like all DRM systems in the past, will be easily broken. This article explains why, as dreadful as the system is, it does have a chance of holding hackers off long enough for the game to make its money. As such, it is, if nothing else, a fascinating experiment. From the article, "Assassin's Creed 2 is different in a key way. Remember, all of its code for saving and loading games (a significant feature, I'm sure you would agree) is tied into logging into a distant server and sending data back and forth. This vital and complex bit of code has been written from the ground up to require having the saved games live on a machine far away, with said machine being programmed to accept, save, and return the game data. This is a far more difficult problem for a hacker to circumvent."
Graphics

DirectX 11 Coming To Browser Games 200

Posted by Soulskill from the see-the-stubble-on-your-stick-figure's-chin dept.
arcticstoat writes "Forget Farmville, Flash puzzlers and 8-bit home computer emulators. The next generation of browser games will be able to take advantage of DirectX 11 effects, not to mention multi-core processing and both Havok and PhysX physics effects. A new browser plug-in called WebVision will be available for Trinergy's new game engine, Vision Engine 8. This will enable game developers to port all the advanced effects from the game engine over to all the common browsers. Of course, any budding 3D-browser-game dev will face the problem that not every PC has a decent graphics card that can handle advanced graphics effects. Not only that, but limited bandwidth will also limit what effects a developer can realistically implement into a browser game. Nevertheless, this is an interesting development that could result in some tight 3D programming, as well as some much more interesting browser games."
Education

Fingerprint Requirement For a Work-Study Job? 578

Posted by timothy from the dept-of-double-speak-is-closed-please-come-in dept.
BonesSB writes "I'm a student at a university in Massachusetts, where I have a federal work-study position. Yesterday, I got an email from the office that is responsible for student run organizations (one of which I work for) saying that I need to go to their office and have my fingerprints taken for the purposes of clocking in and out of work. This raises huge privacy concerns for me, as it should for everybody else. I am in the process of contacting the local newspaper, getting the word out to students everywhere, and talking directly to the office regarding this. I got an email back with two very contradictory sentences: 'There will be no image of your fingerprints anywhere. No one will have access to your fingerprints. The machine is storing your prints as a means of identifying who you are when you touch it.' Does anybody else attend a school that requires something similar? This is an obvious slippery slope, and something I am not taking lightly. What else should I do?"

Comment Re:Professionalism (Score 0) 1231

by Random Person 1372 (#29976034) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

That has got me thinking... How can the London stock Exchange crash twice with Windows Server in one year, but didn' t crash at all in all previous years it was running Linux? Professional quality must mean that the quality sucks...

Umm, didn't the London Stock Exchange run Solaris or some other commercial unix/unix-like system before switching to Microsoft Windows? Even now they switched (or still plan to switch? I don't know) to a heterogenos environment running both Solaris and Linux.

Comment Re:Professionalism (Score 0) 1231

by Random Person 1372 (#29975948) Attached to: Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

And that's not to say that sticking with old versions is always bad, it's just that the method of deciding what's stable is literally "is it old?". Why not test things and then update, instead of arbitrarily picking a version and declaring it to be stable? Or keep track of projects that release safe code and give them 2 weeks to make sure there's no horrible bugs, and then update (like what exactly is the reason for holding back Firefox and Pidgin?).

Because it is hard to do so. You cannot assure that there are no regressions as you can only test very few configurations, then somebody has to spend the resources to do the actual testing, and so on.

A stable (i.e. static) release means that at least no *new* regressions are introduced. Sometimes an exception has to be made (e.g. security updates), but these fixes are often backported to the version supplied in the release to avoid changes in behaviour as much as possible, but sometimes there are still regressions (see the security updates Debian provides, sometimes there are follow-ups due to regressions *not* noticed during testing). How many more regressions would there be when *new* upstream releases are included in the stable release?

Comment Re:How hard is it? (Score 0) 239

by Random Person 1372 (#29959858) Attached to: EU Wants To Redefine "Closed" As "Nearly Open"

Okular (the KDE PDF viewer) also obeys DRM restrictions by default, but at least it can be turned off in the preferences (Setting Configure, General, Obey DRM limitations). I believe this was implemented due to Adobe's requirements. If Apple's PDF viewer does not allow to ignore DRM restrictions, maybe you should just use a different one that allows to do so?
Earth

Plowing Carbon Into the Fields 467

Posted by kdawson from the going-green-can-be-exhausting dept.
OzPeter writes "A wheat farmer in Australia has eliminated adding fertilizer to his crop by the simple process of injecting the cooled diesel exhaust of his modified tractor into the ground when the wheat is being sown. In doing so he eliminates releasing carbon into the atmosphere and at the same time saves himself up to $500,000 (AUD) that would have been required to fertilize his 3,900 hectares in the traditional way. Yet his crop yields over the last two years have been at least on par with his best yields since 2001. The technique was developed by a Canadian, Gary Lewis of Bio Agtive, and is currently in trial at 100 farms around the world."
It's funny. Laugh.

What If They Turned Off the Internet? 511

Posted by timothy from the very-funny-now-where-is-slashdot dept.
theodp writes "It's the not-too-distant future. They've turned off the Internet. After the riots have settled down and the withdrawal symptoms have faded, how would you cope? Cracked.com asked readers to Photoshop what life would be like in an Internet-addicted society learning to cope without it. Better hope it never happens, or be prepared for dry-erase message boards, carrier pigeon-powered Twitter, block-long lines to get into adult video shops, door-to-door Rickrolling, Lolcats on Broadway, and $199.99 CDs."
Moon

Caves of the Moon 172

Posted by Soulskill from the and-the-horrors-that-lurk-within dept.
jeno passes along this excerpt from New Scientist: "A deep hole on the moon that could open into a vast underground tunnel has been found for the first time. The discovery strengthens evidence for subsurface, lava-carved channels that could shield future human colonists from space radiation and other hazards. ... The hole measures 65 meters across, and based on images taken at a variety of sun angles, the hole is thought to extend down at least 80 meters. It sits in the middle of a rille, suggesting the hole leads into a lava tube as wide as 370 meters across."

Comment Re:4chan (Score 0) 330

by Random Person 1372 (#28924873) Attached to: Even More Restriction For German Internet

It is sad that you see Freedom of Expression, one of the Human Rights, as a privilege that can be taken away instead of an inalienable right. On the same line of thought goverments take away the *right* (not privilege) not to be tortured (because you are an evil person and so do not deserve any "privileges")...

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